Audi & Porsche Gurgaon Dealers Held for Duping Banks of Rs 270 Crore

Rash Pal Sing Todd and Mandhir Singh Todd, the owners of Audi and Porsche dealerships in Gurgaon, have been arrested from IGI Delhi airport while they were about to fly out of the country after defaulting on a bank loan of Rs 270 crore.

The Todds are the owners of the Zenica Group, which, in turn, owns Porsche Centre Gurugram, Audi Gurugram, Audi Delhi Central, Audi Approved Plus and Audi Service Gurugram. The duo was arrested after the Delhi Police received a complaint from the HDFC Bank for forgery and cheating.

The Zenica Group is the largest Audi and Porsche dealer in India. It annually earns in turn of Rs 500 crore from sales and service. It sells roughly 140 Audi cars and 20 Porsche cars every year. The former is 20% of Audi India’s net annual sales.

HDFC says that the Todds borrowed Rs 270 crore from a consortium of HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Canara Bank, J&K Bank and Volkswagen Finance. Out of this, HDFC lent Rs 120 crore. The duo applied for the loan on the basis of balance sheets that showed profits. However, on August 28, they sent an email to HDFC bank, expressing their inability to replay the loan amount owing to heavy losses they’ve incurred in the last four years.

It has been verified that the documents submitted for the loan approval were forged.“It is clear that the accused, in order to obtain credit facilities, forged the documents on the basis of which a huge amount of credit was released,” said Sanjay Sharma, assistant vice-president of HDFC Bank, who filed the FIR on the bank’s behalf. He said the Todds had acted in “a well thought out and calculated manner” eyeing “wrongful gain to themselves.”

It’s said that the Todds sold 32 demo cars bought from the loan amount and kept all the money they made from the deals with themselves. An officer with EOW Delhi said the FIR has been registered under sections 406 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery), 471 (forging document), and 120B (conspiracy) of IPC.

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